Site Mobile Navigation

In a PGA Tournament, Shaping Words and Shooting for High Scores

THOUSAND OAKS, Calif. — The competition is so fierce, several good players steer clear of the tournaments. Slow play is a continual problem. And the specter of cheating is omnipresent, with some golfers refusing to play those they suspect of trying to gain an unfair advantage.

On the PGA Tour, par is not the only score that matters. Words With Friends, a digital Scrabble-like game by Zynga, has gained an enthusiastic following among players and their caddies and families, raising the stakes of their downtime. In 2011, two years after the game’s debut, the tour caddie Steve Hulka organized a yearlong tournament that featured 32 players and culminated with the coronation of Scott Verplank. His name was engraved on a plaque displayed in the 28-foot trailer that Hulka drives from one tour stop to the next.

This year, 64 players took part and Zynga donated $10,000 to the First Tee, a youth golf program supported by the tour, in the name of the winner, Brian Sullivan, a caddie who also won the 2012 tournament. A Zynga spokeswoman estimated that 55 million matches were played around the world at any given time.

Words With Friends is a good companion for golfers, appealing to their analytical and competitive natures and their nomadic lives.

The game is appealing, he said, for three reasons: “It’s smart. It’s social. It’s competitive.”

Hale was standing on the driving range at Sherwood Country Club before the start of the World Challenge, the event hosted by Tiger Woods that ends Sunday. He produced his smartphone and pulled up a completed Words With Friends game that he had saved for much the same reason a 20-handicap golfer keeps the scorecard of his career-low round. On the board was “queridas,” which means darlings in Spanish, a jackpot-scoring word Hale used to beat the golfer Nick Watney.

Hale said he played mostly at night early in the week and in airports. According to statistics compiled by Zynga, the peak hour for tour play is 10 to 11 p.m. Eastern on Wednesdays.

“It’s kind of weird,” Hale said. “As you get toward the weekend, guys get more serious about their golf games and don’t play as much.”

Caddies, many of them college-educated like Sullivan, who has degrees in psychology and sports management from the University of Washington, have been known to make Words With Friends moves surreptitiously while their players practice a few feet away.

On occasion, Sullivan said, another caddie will approach him on the range and say, “I just played one on you.”

The tournament games are another story, he said. It is like the difference between a Tuesday round and a Thursday round on tour. Sullivan will not play a word unless he can give the board his undivided attention. “I’m more meticulous and obsessive about each play,” he said.

Building words is not so different from plotting one’s way around a course. Sullivan approaches the game the way the free-swinging Phil Mickelson does golf, placing a premium on entertainment.

“I always like to throw out funny words,” he said. “I have this Scrabble karma idea going. If I have an opportunity to play a fun word and I pass up the word for one with more value, I’m sort of cheating the game because I’m not enjoying the game.”

Pignuts is one of his silly standbys. “I’ll play a couple of nothing plays to try to set it up,” Sullivan said, adding, “I have this massive dictionary in my head of weird words.”

In the game, as in golf, longer is not necessarily better. Stewart Cink, the 2009 British Open champion, said: “My tendency is to try to spell out the biggest words. That’s not the way to win. Sometimes it’s more important to block the other player.”

Cink describes himself as a fair-to-middling player. “If I have the chance to beat somebody that’s better than I am, I get nervous,” he said.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

At last year’s tournament, he beat Verplank. “That was my career highlight,” Cink said with a laugh by phone from Atlanta, where he was taking a break from both games — Words and golf — to spend time with his family. At his peak, Cink said, he juggled as many as 10 games at once.

“I just like to use it to sharpen my brain,” he said. “If you’re a golfer, seriously, you get kind of dull. It makes me kind of think about something in a different kind of logical way. It kind of exercises the mind.”

Like many players, Cink uses a Words With Friends name that allows him to play under a cloak of anonymity.

“It’s not something you really talk about with people in your real life,” he said. “It’s kind of like a double life.”

Lynn Fowler, the mild-mannered mother of a tour player, undergoes a metamorphosis when she plays the game. Her smile sprouts fangs. Introduced to Words With Friends by her son, Rickie, she has become a feared opponent.

Photo

Keegan Bradley, right, and his caddie Steve Hale, were among the Words With Friends players.Credit
Stanley Chou/Getty Images

During this year’s tournament, she posted the highest point total in a single game, 586. Hulka said that 400 points was considered the Words equivalent of scratch in golf.

In building words on a screen, Fowler has also built a network on the tour, with people who were once nodding acquaintances becoming friends.

“The caddies will come up to me at tournaments and say, ‘Oh, you’re the one who beat me’ and give me a high-five,” she said. “There’s a connection now where before I wouldn’t have been comfortable going up to them.”

Although others praise Fowler’s skill, she bows to Verplank, whom she described as “the master.” Once, she said, he beat her on his final play, using all seven digital tiles to form a word that erased her 100-point lead.

“I think it was like losing the final round of the Masters,” she said. “I was devastated for three days.”

Verplank, a five-time tour winner and the 1984 United States Amateur champion, laughed and said, “She’s serious about it.”

He added: “After I played that last word to beat her, I could see steam going through her ears through my phone. I sent her a text message that said ‘Sorry about that’ with a smiley face.”

Verplank, who lists Hulka and Lucas Glover, the 2009 United States Open winner, as other strong players, loves the game but disdains those who try to gain an unfair advantage. He declines rematches with anyone whose moves raise red flags.

“There’s no way you can get 85 points on every word if you’re not using a cheating app,” Verplank explained, adding: “As in golf, why would you play if you have to cheat to be good at it? What’s the point?”

It is left to Hulka to police the tournament. The cheaters are not his biggest headache, he said. He had to ban two caddies from next year’s tournament because of slow play.

“It’s kind of funny,” he said. “It’s just like golf.”

Next year, Hulka said, he would love to add the golfer Steve Stricker and the actor Alec Baldwin, who was kicked off a flight for continuing to play Words With Friends after being told repeatedly to turn his phone off.

Stricker, a 12-time tour champion, plays Words With Friends but is hesitant to enter the tournament.

“There’s a lot of good players,” he said. “I can’t compete with them.”

A version of this article appears in print on December 8, 2013, on Page SP10 of the New York edition with the headline: In a PGA Tournament, Shaping Words and Shooting for High Scores. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe